The intelligent edge is still a new concept for many. So what is it and why do they need it?

Gareth James, network and security sales specialist, VMware: The intelligent edge is important for three reasons. You need real-time decision-making at the edge, where speed is important and you can’t afford the latency of roundtrips. Then you’ve got cost reduction – the more processing you can do at the edge, the less data you have to send back to head office, so you can reduce your data bandwidth costs. Lastly, it’s about business continuity, because the last thing you want is that if you lose connectivity to the edge, the business can’t function.